<p>By becoming more like its peer schools?</p>
<p>No. Well yes. But not nearly as much as you might think. The culture is still intensely academic, a bit nerdy, etc. Students here still take pride in being slightly nerdy.</p>
<p>Many alums from my era (let’s just say far enough back to be the parent of a recent grad) that I know have no love for the culture of their era. When my D started a few years ago, that culture had only partly left.</p>
<p>Since a university “culture” is driven by a variety of factors, including location, history, administration policies and so forth, I don’t think we’re seeing a radical change as much as an evolution. For example, unless the admin did a complete about face, you’ll never see U. Chicago with a major sports vibe. You won’t see an expanded frat culture, because all the decent nearby real estate is controlled by the U. So the distinction between UofC and Northwestern will continue, it is safe to say.</p>
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<p>Interesting - how does that prevent a frat culture from becoming established?</p>
<p>On the frat note, there are actually two new frats opening up on campus this year… not with houses, yet, and with limited success at actually recruiting people. Also, keep in mind that a UChicago frat is typically pretty different than the same frat on a different campus. For example, SigEP is full of econ and finance guys who go on to work at consulting firms - the chapter on campus has the highest average GPA of any SigEp chapter in the country. Instead of hazing, they do mock interviews and other skill-oriented meetings/seminars.</p>
<p>We certainly felt a different vibe when we toured with D2 (HS junior) this fall vs. touring for D1 five years ago. There was no mention of “Life of the Mind”, no discussion of the statue that projects the hammer & sickle shadow, not even a mention of Indiana Jones. It felt… sort of like every other university on this second tour. I asked the tour guide about this afterwards, and she freely admitted that she thought the university was having a tough time finding “their type” in the avalanche of applications they are getting now from the common app, and there has been a change in the type of students being admitted. Also that the new head of admissions had a different focus in recruiting for students. I don’t think she was really happy about it…</p>
<p>We were also disappointed that D2 has not gotten any of the quirky mailings that characterized U of C when D1 applied (postcards with every coffee shop around campus marked, etc.).</p>
<p>D2 was excited to visit, as she remembered visiting with her sister and loved it then. She is JUST the bright, quirky kid that would be a perfect fit, but after our visit this fall she is less certain that it is a fit. So while we are just a family with a kid applying, from our perspective it does seem like something has been lost.</p>
<p>Wow - interesting - thanks for that anecdote. Wow…</p>
<p>intparent – she hasn’t gotten quirky postcards?! What? They still send out tons of mailings that can definitely be described as quirky.</p>
<p>Isn’t the OP a prospective grad student? The overall character of the student body shouldn’t make a great difference to him/her, at least not nearly as much as it would for a potential undergrad. </p>
<p>And intparent, I always felt that the hammer and sickle and Indiana Jones stories were very typical college tour subjects when I was researching UChicago. I also received plenty of the “quirky” mailings you described, though this is a horribly overused and meaningless term. A good deal of UChicago’s perceived change may indeed be coming from a decrease in the number of individualistic, unafraid to put themselves out there types within the student body, but a good portion of it may just come from the expectations of people such as yourself for what “quirky” should be. I don’t see how your daughter can be quirky in the sense that a campus culture can be.</p>
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<p>It won’t make a difference in my overall decision. But Chicago’s idiosyncratic culture still made me love the place even more. And grad students can participate in scavenger hunt too.</p>
<p>It does appear that the undergrads discriminate less against grad students at Chicago than at most other places too. As an early entrance student at a commuter school, I had zero opportunity for any coherent social life at college, and would like to see what it’s like in grad school.</p>
<p>I mean, Chicago undergrads are generally people who should be taken seriously, and Chicago is known for given a lot of freedom to its undergrads too. And I don’t believe in barriers (though I will do my utmost to impose them at least with respect to the students I TA, but only the students I TA).</p>
<p>dunbar equates Chicago’s quirkiness with the number of “individualistic” students, but I’m not so sure that’s right. In one major sense, at least, Chicago is highly anti-individualistic. I’m referring to the core curriculum. If you contrast Chicago and Brown, for example, the latter is far more individualistic in terms of curriculum. By having a core curriculum, Chicago ensures that each student is not just off on some individual project, disconnected from all the other students. At Brown, for example, a student can take 33 electives and not even major in anything if that’s what they’d like. They can even take everything pass/fail if that’s what they’d like. More typically, students take their major requirements and then mostly electives. This at best only weakly ensures a community of scholars studying a lot of the same things, and it severly undermines informed and rigorous student dialog about academic subjects.</p>
<p>Some years ago, I took our foster son–a refugee from Africa–on a prospective student tour of Brown. When we left the info. session, he was very angry, and he asked, “What kind of school is this where there are no requirements!” I was taken back at his vehemence and frustration. Ever the problem-solver, though, I tried to convince him that he wasn’t prohibited from cloning anyone’s core curriculum for himself if he wanted to. Moreover, he could use it to his advantage in some of his weak areas by avoiding them or taking them pass/fail. Although he was polite in his responses, I could tell he was very deeply bothered by the Brown system, and he barely said anything at lunch. As we were waiting for a discussion session to start, the light bulb went off in my head that what he might really bothered by was the maximal individualism represented by the Brown system–that there would be no serious curricular/communal dimension there. I asked him if this is what was really bothering him, and he immediatly said, “Yes, exactly!” I then asked him if we were wasting our time and should hit the road, and he again said, “Yes.”</p>
<p>As a grad student, your social circle (and life) will most likely consist mainly of the fellow grad students in your department, plus the few undergrads who decide to involve themselves in the graduate life of your department (more common in small, highly-specialized majors where undergrads end up taking grad classes in order to meet graduation requirements). The overall campus culture probably won’t impact you much, so whether or not it’s losing its “idiosyncratic culture” (whatever that means) is almost besides the point. Very generally, I find that outside of extracurriculars and classes, grad students and undergrads simply don’t mingle much for a variety of reasons.</p>
<p>I think two things: one, that the culture of UChicago is flexible and accommodating to all kinds of students, and two, that it has a quality that reaches out to all alums.
I’m a current student and I’ve felt enveloped into all things UChicago - Scav, the House System, the Core, everything. I’ve also had conversations with parents of friends who went here and took the same Core humanities classes of me, and we can talk about Aristotle and Augustine and Dante. There’s an immediate connection when someone has come from this place.
An alum came back to visit last week to give a talk on her time in Libya, and she compared UChicago to another prominent Ivy by telling us that the thing she loves is that we are truly passionate about the life of the mind. UChicago culture is about learning, and loving the process as much as the end result.</p>
<p>I like what Kim Goff-Crews, Vice-President for Campus Life (who received her BA and JD degrees from Yale) had to say when announcing she would be leaving for a position at Yale: “Although I welcome the opportunity to serve my alma mater, leaving the University of Chicago and all those I have come to know is profoundly bittersweet. I fully believe in the importance of the institution’s specific mission to change the world through the power of ideas.”</p>
<p>…So what I read in Colleges that Change Lives about UChicago is no longer accurate?</p>
<p>Well I no longer have a first choice college…</p>
<p>@rlmmail:</p>
<p>To be honest, I don’t really like the phrase “individualistic” very much either, but at least it makes an attempt to hit upon the reality beneath. In any case your criticism doesn’t really address this–the Core may bring UChicago students closer academically, but it doesn’t really make them substantially more likely to conform to superficiality. In fact, one would hope that the Core would make students more informed individuals who are willing to take risks, be original and creative etc. This is what I meant by “individualistic;” you seemed to think I meant something more along the lines of “intellectually disconnected.” </p>
<p>I’d curious to hear where your foster-son ended up going to school. Among UChicago’s peer institutions, only Columbia really has a comparable core program. Almost every other school either has weak distributional reqs (e.g. Penn, Harvard) or none at all. Distributional reqs certainly don’t foster common discussion any more than no reqs at all. Even at Chicago the disparity between Core sequences makes the possibility for Core-related conversation hit-or-miss. There are plenty of discussions of this kind, however, Core texts or not. Though this isn’t necessarily something that Brown must lack.</p>
<p>@dunbar
My foster son ended up going to Boston College, where they have a core curriculum, though fewer requirements than Chicago or Columbia. It worked out well for him there. But the Brown experience really got me thinking a lot about how a school curriculum influences its campus culture. Before that visit, I vaguely thought the Brown system was flaky, but couldn’t see why it might actually make someone angry. But after seeing his reaction and coming to understand it better, I started to wonder. </p>
<p>Some years later, I read the book, “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,” by Harry Lewis (former dean of Harvard College). Among the problems he cites with Harvard’s weak distribution curriculum is that it creates a kind of “race to the bottom” among students. What he means by this is that in the absence of robust guidelines about what students at a minimum should study and learn, students simply try to find the easiest “A” available to maintain a higher GPA. (He also mentions in passing that Chicago’s core is not really as rigid as its reputation, since there is a good deal of latitude among the choices available.)</p>
<p>After discussing this issue further around the house with both my foster son and biological kids as well, I’m not too surprised that one of my other sons ended up deciding to go to UChicago (and seems to be loving it there now).</p>
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<p>Dunbar, I am a little confused… as part of college searches for my two kids, we have been on a seriously high number of campus visits (more than 20). We like to visit. 
The U of Chicago tour was somewhat unique 5 years ago. Are you saying that other colleges have a statue that casts a hammer & sickle shadow on May 1 (International Worker’s Day) every year? I am just saying that we talked about a LOT of thing on that first tour that aren’t often covered in a college tour (including the tour guide’s sex life), and they really didn’t do the rote “dorm/classroom building/core requirements description” sort of talk we got at other colleges. The tour this time was forumulaic. An awful lot like the other 19 campus tours we have been on. We picked up some literature on the core and found a “Life of the Mind” brochure among piles of materials in the admissions office (actually sort of off to one side, we were looking specifically for them). But I guarantee you that 95% of the people touring aren’t looking for or getting those materials (they have a LOT of handouts, these were not the most prominently displayed ones).</p>
<p>Sorry if you don’t like the word “quirky”. My kid has very high test scores, is somewhat introverted, is a top ranked Quiz Bowler in our state, and loves an intellectual challenge. She collects insects, devours literature, and likes nothing better than hanging out with other very bright kids. She is hugely talented, but it is a somewhat raw (not polished) talent. Seems like a U of C type to me.</p>
<p>Regarding the mailings, I wish we still had the ones from D1’s search. Can’t remember them all, but I think one was a fold out of some kind about the scavenger hunt. The coffee shop one also sticks in my memory. I can say that D1 pretty much scanned and pitched the mailings from every other college, but kept these because they were smart and funny. I think D2 has gotten a couple of postcards (although she signed up on the website several months ago, and has done a college visit), but they were “meh”. Just nothing very creative, smart, vibrant about them.</p>
<p>It could be that all of these changes are due to a change in marketing focus for the University. But if you market it differently, you will attract a different type of student as well.</p>
<p>Intparent, you said:</p>
<p>“Sorry if you don’t like the word “quirky”. My kid has very high test scores, is somewhat introverted, is a top ranked Quiz Bowler in our state, and loves an intellectual challenge. She collects insects, devours literature, and likes nothing better than hanging out with other very bright kids. She is hugely talented, but it is a somewhat raw (not polished) talent. Seems like a U of C type to me.”</p>
<p>Hah - that’s a great description, and this sounds EXACTLY like what a lot of my peers when I attended UChicago were into more than a decade ago. </p>
<p>Also, I’m sure there are still a lot of kids like that at UChicago. My guess, though, is that the percentage of the student body who is like this is lower in 2012 than it was in say, 1992. </p>
<p>I think your daughter’s interests, love of quiz bowl, etc. all sounds great, but it’s not necessarily advisable to have a class of 1300+ students being “quirky.” As I’ve stated, Chicago tried to have this model in the past, and it didn’t really help the institutional health of the school. I’m sure there are still a vocal group of kids like this at U of C, but I’m fine with and actually encourage having a more diverse incoming class (read: some quirky folks, some very mainstream folks, some wonks, some bright jocks, etc.).</p>
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<p>Can you clarify how the institutional health of the school was damaged by this model? It seems to me that it was extremely successful. Sure, they didn’t have a 6% admit rate. But they still had a lot more qualified applicants than they had space for, and nobody would consider the education or quality of students to be anything but top rate. As my dad said, “University of Chicago? That is where the eggheads go.” And that was a pretty fine niche to own, IMHO.</p>
<p>Were they having financial problems due to the old model? Or just “statistical envy” for those Ivies or near-Ivies on the common app who are getting 15 times more applications than they could actually matriculate (cough, Stanford)?</p>